Léon Perrault

Growing up in a poor home, Perrault saw his artistic talent as a means to escape destitution and to give his family a better life.  Soon outgrowing the drawing lessons available in his native village of Poitiers, the young artist was given a pension for travel to Paris, and in 1853 entered the home and studio of François Edouard Picot. Perrault would go on to study at the Académie des Beaux Arts and the Académie Julian, where he would meet his friend and mentor William Bouguereau.   While Perrault's early career is highlighted by works featuring traditional allegorical, religious and military subjects, many of his most memorable compositions follow Bouguereau's artistic example.   The present composition, with its seamstress wearing a simple dress, back supporting a heavy basket overflowing with mending, closely resembles the formats and models of Bouguereau's knitting girls in La Tricoteuse of 1864 (Fig. 1. Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha Nebraska) and 1884 (Fig. 2, sold: Sotheby's, New York, October 24 & 26, 2006, lot 87, illustrated).   In his sensitive portrayals of peasant girls occupied by their daily tasks, Perrault, like Bouguereau, hoped to elevate the image of France's most humble citizens.  When Perrault painted The Young Seamstress, France was emerging from decades of great social change.   Revolutions had replaced kings with presidents, transformed farms into factories, and the demands of modern business threatened the agrarian way of life.   Yet these concerns were eased by finely painted portraits of washerwomen, knitters, seamstresses and other rural craftspeople, the tools of their simple trade held close in hand as they stand in vertical picture spaces in front of loosely painted landscapes. There is a naturalistic truth to Perrault's representation of the seamstress, her skin slightly reddened by rough winds and harsh sun, her hands resting mid-stitch. At the same time, the composition's smooth brushwork erases the presence of the painter, and creates a balance between immobile, static form and rich surface details, textures, and color.  As such, The Young Seamstress combines the real and the idealized, connected yet apart from the daily life of the nineteenth century. This lovely young woman sits in a pristine setting where ugliness, poverty and pessimism--harsh realities of late nineteenth century rural life--are not evident.   Yet the carefully constructed canvas demonstrates that Perrault saw the work not as a flight of fancy but as a world he hoped to see: one made all the more possible by the great success, fame and wealth such compositions brought him in the art marketplace.